Please Don’t Smoke Tobacco Out Of Cheap Bongs

If you’ve noticed the signs over the shelves of cheap bongs at the head shop in your town saying “for tobacco use only” and your stash is running low, it might be tempting to consider the possibility of trying out a pinch of tobacco in your bong. Please don’t do it. Yes, I understand the logic of wondering what exactly the world of difference might be between a little cheap bong and a big hookah for shisha smoking, but it is in fact quite a significant one.

First of all, the tobacco you would likely be using from a cigarette which you tear open is not at all the same thing as what is used in shisha for hookahs. Tobacco used for cigarettes is so heavily processed it is nowhere near the natural tobacco plant which has been traditionally smoked from hookahs or pipes by aboriginal populations across the globe. Smoking that kind of tobacco from a cheap bong also means that you’re smoking it without the little dense cotton filter at the end of every cigarette sold commercially. If you’ve ever smoked a whole cigarette, I’m sure you’ve seen the difference in color of the filter by the end of the smoke.

That little thing captures a whole lot of really harmful toxins and of course this doesn’t make cigarettes healthy by any stretch of the imagination, but removing that barrier doesn’t aid the situation at all. Water does a very poor job of filtering out much of anything, in fact its main function is simply to cool down the smoke to allow you to take in a higher volume of smoke when you take a big rip. That means if you were to smoke tobacco through water, you’d be inhaling way more toxins and carcinogens than usual, and possibly taking much larger lungfuls than you might be used to. The only person I’ve ever known to listen to a dare and smoke a big fat bowl of tobacco out of a shitty cheap bong immediately turned and puked after inhaling, so I’d recommend just not trying it, ever.